My time as a system administrator makes me rather fond of logging as text into files. They're simple, easy to scale, to rotate, to compress and to throw away.

My time as a system administrator makes me rather fond of logging as text into files. They're simple, easy to scale, to rotate, to compress and to throw away. One variation on this theme that I read about recently is to produce log lines as JSON objects rather than more "traditional" printf-formatted text. This gives machine readability but also makes for really simple tools for extracting whatever "traditional" log lines you like. (see: https://github.com/trentm/json https://github.com/trentm/json) You can also easily add new fields without breaking existing log parsing code. I believe I first read about logging in JSON here: http://journal.paul.querna.org/articles/2011/12/26/log-for-machines-in-json/ http://journal.paul.querna.org/articles/2011/12/26/log-for-m...